Monday Morning Musing

Have you heard that AIG filed a suit against the Federal Government for what they claimed was unfair terms of the 2008 bailout? In case you've forgotten that debacle, AIG is the insurance company that made multibillion-dollar bad bets on mortgages and put us on the brink of financial collapse. They were given $182 billion in bailout money, which current ads from AIG are saying that they have paid back, with interest. They also take thirty seconds of our time to let us know how much they are doing  to help victims of the terrible storm Sandy.

A little tug on the heartstrings to keep us from thinjing about the knife they proposed to stick into our pocketbooks. Keep in mind that any successful suit of the government means money out of our pockets, more money on top of what already came out of our pockets.

Talking to a friend about this, he commented, "That takes a lot of chutzpah. The operational definition of chutzpah being 'murdering your parents and then throwing yourself on the mercy of the courts because you are an orphan.'"

Thomas G. Donlan made the same statement in his article in Barrons, where he also wrote, "The AIG 'rescue' was a shameful episode in U.S. financial history, one that will come back to haunt the taxpayers and the government's creditors the next time an insurance company, a bank, a nonbank, a government-sponsored enterprise, or a Ponzi scheme seems too big to fail and too big to dismember, and is assuredly too big to succeed." 

Over the weekend I learned that AIG has backed down from the suit. According to an editorial in The Dallas Morning News, "After a little shaming and angry public backlash, AIG is sheepishly bakcking off, but it's reminded us that you can't spell ingrate without AIG."

So my post today wouldn't leave you on a downbeat, I looked online for a comic strip to share. Just for fun, check out today's strip from Luann. Young people use libraries for the most interesting reasons.